Kjell Espmark was a professor of literature, poet, member of the Swedish Academy from 1981, and an extremely prolific writer and playwright, translated into more than 20 languages.

Memory, responsibility, guilt, lost love and longing were some of the great existential topics that Kjell Espmark explored.

The traces of growing up with parents in crisis and failing care run like a red thread through the authorship.

Recurring scenes: Childhood fears, lack of trust;

vulnerability, pain, losses: "the many signs of how fragile, how helplessly fragile reality is.

You can lose your footing at any time.

And fall and fall", writes Espmark in the autobiography Minnena ljuger (2010).

Conflict with Horace Engdahl

During the crisis in the Swedish Academy, Kjell Espmark found himself in conflict with his former student in literary studies, Horace Engdahl, whom he blamed for friendship corruption as well as being conservative and opposing renewal.

On April 6, 2018, Espmark left the Academy together with Peter Englund and Klas Östergren, but only the latter requested an official resignation.

Espmark and Englund returned the following year, only to find themselves in a new crisis with the selection of Peter Handke as the 2019 literature laureate, due to his pro-Serbian denial of genocide in the Balkan wars.

Kjell Espmark claimed that the prize winner's literary qualities must decide.

In the Academy, he henceforth chose a conciliatory line and said that he wanted to work for the reformation of the Academy.

Considered himself an anarchist

Distrust of power and authority followed Espmark, despite his literary successes, all the way to the grand residence Villa Bergsgården above the main entrance to Skansen at the Royal Djurgården, where in 2020 on his 90th birthday he explained to Dagens Nyheter, a newspaper that he had often been in over the years with the fact that he "has strong anarchist sympathies."

He takes the side of the oppressed, seeks freedom, but "never becomes selfish and grandiose, but challenges through thoughtfulness", writes Aris Fioretos in the preface to The Only Necessary.

Poems 1956-2009. 

In the Milky Way from 2007, "eons of time seem to condense into the head of a pin" - according to Fioretos, Espmark has succeeded in turning an entire starry sky into a book.

If Kjell Espmark sometimes felt lost in life, there was a reliable abode in the language - stable as the primeval rock.